


Episode 0: "Storyteller 2.0"

by Buffyisamoderngirl2022



Series: Buffy + 20 [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Post-Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:21:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28514109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Buffyisamoderngirl2022/pseuds/Buffyisamoderngirl2022
Summary: This story is the teaser/trailer to my "Buffy + 20" script, or a television Buffy Season 8. I've read the Season 8 comics but they got too... epic. I missed the core gang dealing with real world problems in monster form.  Instead of a new Buffy series being a reboot with new casting, I started thinking about what the story could look like with the original cast and what the fallout from Season 7 would be on these very human characters twenty years after closing the Sunnydale Hellmouth.  My re-imagined Season 8 only uses the Buffy and Angel TV shows as canon.  My goal is to draft scripts for a 13 episode season as if it were to air on Netflix or Hulu. The show would take place in late Fall 2022.
Series: Buffy + 20 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088744
Kudos: 6





	Episode 0: "Storyteller 2.0"

[Close on Buffy's face, looking just off camera, documentary interview style]

Buffy: Actions have consequences. It's been about twenty years since we closed the Hellmouth in Sunnydale and I've felt the consequences of that day ripple through practically every moment since.

Let me explain. [Pause]. [Imitating Inigo Montoya] No it's too much. Let me sum up. [Pauses for a laugh she doesn't get]

[Buffy shrugs] I'm a 42 year-old vampire slayer. I'm pretty sure I'm the oldest Slayer to have ever existed. Yay me. Slayers don't normally have such a long shelf life.

[Buffy pauses, thinking] What are some other "pros" to my life right now? Still alive, that's a biggie. Still got my Slayer strength and speed-ish. I can still catch a speeding school bus, which is pretty cool, well, for me anyway. It embarrasses the crap out of JJ, which is fun too.

Mostly these days I'm a boring functional adult. I got everything I ever wanted. I helped defeat the original evil, close a hellmouth, save my friends, finished college, got a career, got married, had a kid, got divorced and am living an eerily similar life to that of my mother. I have a nine year-old daughter named Joan Joyce Summers, who prefers to go by JJ.

As much as I hate admitting it, that stupid career test we took back in high school ended being right - I wound up law enforcement. I've worked as a homicide detective for the local PD for the last ten years and was a beat cop for a couple years before that. It turns out that all the death and gore during my formative teen years uniquely prepared me for the stresses of working in homicide. Sort of. What humans do to each other daily is a less comprehensible evil to me.

Let's see... what else? I teach women's self-defense classes every Tuesday at the local community center and have weirdly really gotten into beekeeping lately. And that's about it.

I mean, sure, I still go out and patrol a few nights a week, what can I say? Some habits are hard to shake. But that's hardly anything compared to my early years. The Slaying is basically a leisure activity at this point. Ever since we closed the Sunnydale Hellmouth and good won out at the Battle of Los Angeles, the demon-y side of things have been pretty chill. If I'm lucky I run across a vampire or two a month. You know, lucky in a relative sense.

The rest of the Scoobies? Well, this is where the "cons" list part of my life comes in. Here goes. Maybe it will hurt less if I say it quickly.

Faith? [Matter of fact. Detached] Dead. Died in a motorcycle accident in 2008. She and Robin had just moved in together. It was horrible. Kids, always wear a helmet.

Xander? [Buffy's face goes hard] I haven't spoken to him since he got out of rehab again some time in 2012. He turned into the version of himself that he most feared - he became like his father. He became a drunken abusive asshole. Something in him broke after Anya's death and he tried to fill the void left by her absence with booze. It was a slow decline until it wasn't. And. Yeah. [Buffy pauses] Last time I had any interaction with him was after we put him in rehab once again, which this time happened to be court mandated because he had hit his then-girlfriend in a drunken rage. Xander... well, my heart hurts if I think too much about Xander.

Willow? [Slightly sad and bitter] We haven't had a real conversation since our falling out in 2005 when I made her revoke the Slayer empowerment spell. Turns out creating hundreds of untrained superheroes at once can have some serious knock on effects. Long story short, I wanted to reverse the spell after the Battle of Los Angeles, Willow didn't. It is always said that all magic has a price, and the price for that spell was our friendship. But not in a mystical "debt to be paid" kind of way, more of a metaphor for my, "I'm the Slayer and I get to say what happens with the other slayers" vs. Willow's "I think you are wrong and I'm the one who has to do the spell and if you force me to do what I think is wrong I can't be your friend anymore" kind of way. So that sucked. I still think I was right though. Well, mostly.

But from what I can see from social media Willow is living her best life. She and Kennedy didn't last - obviously. She finished up her degree at Stanford before getting her PhD at MIT. Once again, that dumb career day test was right, and computer science was her calling, and matter of fact, it was also Oz's. Willow and Oz crossed paths again at MIT when they ended up in the same PhD program and founded a software company together called [mockingly] "Moon Phases Engineering". I like calling it Moofa for short. From what I understand they mostly work with super-secret government stuff. I don't really know how much of her life still involves being a witch. I see that she and her wife post lots of jokey witch memes online, but that's about it. [Buffy looks away] I dunno, she seems happy. I'm happy for her.

Dawn? [Buffy's face lights up] Dawn is great! I am so proud of her. She is definitely the most well-adjusted out of all of us. We resettled after Sunnydale and she finished high school. Went to college and law school, became a lawyer, hated it. Quit and went to culinary school and recently opened her first restaurant. It turns out her taste palate needed some time to mature to go from "mix all the cereals!" to creating food that was truly magical. JJ loves visiting Auntie Dawnie to help her out in her kitchen.

Angel and Spike? Well I never quite understood the whole story, but the quick and dirty version is Angel's whole gang got sucked into another dimension in order to end the Battle of Los Angeles, and when they popped back out years had passed here on Earth where it had only been hours in that other dimension. Angel came to find me but I had just gotten married and seeing your high school flame skulk around when you are in newly-wedded bliss is rather annoying. When I told him to knock it off and either actually play nice around my husband or back off, he muttered some passive aggressive comment about "someone else getting to eat finished cookie me" and left town. We exchanged emails for a while when he wanted to update me with his most recent demon hunting exploits, but I haven't heard from him in a couple of years. I assume he is doing okay. [Buffy pauses and looks down and starts fidgeting with an item/drawing on the table] I never told him about my divorce though. For some reason I don't want to admit that failure to him.

[Buffy looks back up] I only heard about Spike's resurrection from Angel during the prep for the Battle of Los Angeles. William the Bloody was too much of a weenie to tell me himself that he was alive. Well, he still is I suppose. I mean, both alive and a weenie. I've never heard from him at all since Sunnydale. Not gonna lie, that stung for a while. [She shakes the feeling off]

Giles? [Buffy gives a warm but almost sad smile] Things with Giles are both the best and the worst. The best because he moved in with me and JJ about six months ago and having him so present in my life again filled a hole in my heart I didn't even know existed. JJ continues to call him Grandpa Gyles even though she has been able to say his name correctly for years now, but Giles doesn't seem to mind. But things are with Giles are the worst because of his reason for moving in with me. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's about a year ago, the doctors think it has something to do with his history of Traumatic Brain Injury. He is still mostly fine, but he had a bad fall and broke his clavicle earlier this year and I managed to talk him in to moving in with me not long after. I think JJ's repeated insistence and giving him drawings of all of the fun things they would do together helped ultimately sway him. I've been worried about him since his wife Marjorie passed away from cancer in 2018. I'm so glad I don't have to worry about something terrible happening to him all alone in England any more.

So that's pretty much the sitch with the Scoobies twenty years after closing the Hellmouth. Oh! The Sunnydale crater has become a nature preserve, so that's neat!

[Muffled other voice heard from off-screen]

What do you mean I forgot a Scoobie? Who? [Muffled voice responds]

You? Riiiggght, sorry Andrew.

[Buffy looks more intently at the off-screen interviewer, now revealed to be Andrew]

Uh, yeah, what are you doing here? I mean, I've seen your posts on social media, which, cute by the way, but why are you here at my house?

[Camera switches from Andrew's "interviewing" camera to the omniscient-style camera showing the two of them sitting at a table in Buffy's kitchen with Andrew's camera and sound equipment on and around the table]

Andrew: [Excited] I've been gathering materials for my autobiography, currently titled "Mastermind: A Tale of a Humble Life" or "Trogdor the Burninator's Revenge" you know, something snappy like that.

Buffy: Your autobiography? [Staccato] Huh? What? Why?

Andrew: [Upbeat] Uh huh! And I figured I should highlight some exciting side characters from my formative years, and since Warren and Jonathan are, well, dead, you were the next on next up on my influencer list.

Buffy: Lucky me.

Andrew: Exactamundo! Without you and the other Scoobies making me your "guestage" and going from my nemeses to besties I never would have learned the lessons I needed to become a bona fide social media star! I figure now's a good a time as any to start writing my autobiography, [mumbles quickly] that I'm sure someone somewhere will want to publish…

Buffy: [Deadpan, looking just off camera, sighs] Like I said, actions have consequences.

[END]


End file.
